Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday October 14, 2016 @04:00AM
from the socially-awkward-birthday-parties dept.

prisoninmate writes from Softpedia: Can you believe it's been 20 years since the KDE (Kool Desktop Environment) was announced on the 14th of October, 1996, by project founder Matthias Ettrich? Well, it has, and today we'd like to say a happy 20th birthday to KDE! "On October 14, KDE celebrates its 20th birthday. The project that started as a desktop environment for Unix systems, today is a community that incubates ideas and projects which go far beyond desktop technologies. Your support is very important for our community to remain active and strong," reads the timeline page prepared by the KDE project for this event. Feel free to share your KDE experiences in a comment below! You can read the announcement "that started the revolution of the modern Linux desktop," as well as view the timeline "prepared by the KDE team for this unique occasion."

I used to like KDE 3.5 but when 4.0 dropped and showed that the developers were more interested in UI-fads and flashy wiz-bangery, I went to GNOME. Then it turned to sh*t, so I switched to Mac over 3 years ago, and I've mostly been pretty happy. I like a UI that's functional and doesn't change to keep up with the latest (unproven or poorly tested) fashions.

I haven't noticed any random UI changes made by Apple that have degraded the user experience (on OS X at least, I can't say the say for iOS). If a Mac user from 20 years ago came through time to today he'd be right at home with the operating system, and would have no trouble adapting in a short space of time.

Darn developers always changing things. I DON'T LIKE IT! Personally KDE lost me when they got rid of Kandalf, $DEITY I loved that guy, it's never been the same since.
After that I moved to my own desktop environment made from the left over bits of emacs with a touch of vim which will work together provided you interface via a remote proxy.
I also whip myself with nettles every month as it helps me to remember the 386 instruction codes in hexadecimal (I have a system).

I'm not understanding your beef with Qt5. I'm not an expert on Qt5 specifically (I have direct experience with Qt4), but Qt has been used for quite some time in embedded systems, in fact that's one of it's big money-makers, and embedded systems do *not* run Intel CPUs of any kind, they overwhelmingly use ARMs. In fact, performance is generally cited as one of Qt's strengths, even compared to Gtk. LXDE switched to Qt because of all the problems with Gtk under Gnome's stewardship, and according to the LXDE

The single good thing about GTK3 I know of is HiDPI support i.e. 200% scaling of applications (or 300%, though that is useless).Linux Mint is porting various stuff to GTK3 (like the Update Manager, etc.) or adding Hi DPI support if those were already using GTK3. So Mint 18.1 Cinnamon might be something of a show case while keeping a real desktop with File Edit View.. menu bars, although if you have e.g. a 2560x1440 monitor this kind of turns it into a 1280x720 one. Sucks balls but one day you'll be able to

The problem is investment in old software and hardware drivers is often obsoleted by Apple without consideration. Have an old copy of Adobe? On Windows, it'll probably run forever. On Mac, you're fucked. It won't run on Linux (properly), but at least supporting open source alternatives indefinitely is possible. How about old hardware? I have an ancient Creative EMU 0404 USB audio interface with two XLR inputs. After El Capitan, forget about that old (64bit intel!) driver still working. On Linux or Windows? No problem. It'll probably run as long as the thing still works.

From a hardware standpoint on the Mac line, Apple is flailing. Mac Pros are generations behind. The iMacs and Macbook Pros are supposed to be for film editors and photography / design creatives, but don't even ship with 10bit color HDR LCD panels. They lock you into hardware configurations that are next to impossible to upgrade out of. And give no flexibility to support common pro applications. It's Apple's way or the highway. I mean, why not buy Final Cut Pro X and Logic? Who needs that stuff the whole rest of the world has standardized on already.

I like MacOS. It's pretty good. There's bash and python and what I don't get out of the box I can add with homebrew. And there are some commercial apps I'm absolutely dependent on still, which I wouldn't have with Linux. In particular, Scrivener, MS Office, and Adobe. But if I have to buy these things again - particularly Adobe, Linux and Windows here I come. Lack of Adobe plugin availability on Mac is a real downer.

Apple is so focused on selling iPhones and iPads, they simply don't care about customer needs any more. It can be a damn nightmare to get real work done.

How about old hardware? I have an ancient Creative EMU 0404 USB audio interface with two XLR inputs. After El Capitan, forget about that old (64bit intel!) driver still working. On Linux or Windows? No problem. It'll probably run as long as the thing still works.

Huh? I've heard tons of complaints from Windows users about old hardware no longer being supported on new Windows versions because the drivers aren't fully compatible, and being forced to toss out perfectly good hardware because they "upgraded" Win

Several months ago the distribution I use decided to force plasma on everyone, and for me it made my desktop unusable. It was crashing all the time and doing other strange things. I was told to use the nvidia driver instead of nouveau but that made no difference whatsoever, so, quite annoyed, I went back to kde4 which was in some really strange state due to the way packages are handled (some things required kde5???)

Recently after trying to apply updates it was not possible to stay on kde4 unless you stopped

I should mention I tried a few other DEs, Mate, xfce, and a couple others which I've now forgotten - mostly tools like the file browsers feel like a regression back into the 1990s. What do you mean I can't click and drag files and get a popup asking what I can do with them (move, copy, etc)? KDE feels like the least annoying of the bunch as far as usability, but that's not something to strive for.

That file dragging feature was in 1990s Windows I believe, by dragging a file with a right-click. I've just tried it on Mate : that isn't possible, as a context menu for the original file opens instead. But you can do it with middle-mouse dragging.It's a bit stupid, because I would never have discovered it if not for your post, and because most laptops don't have middle mouse or have some way of doing it that varies depending on hardware and OS.I can confirm pcmanfm-qt works the same (the most recent of tho

Great to see KDE and its improvements over the years.
If you want to give KDE a go then I suggest trying KDE neon. You get the latest KDE on top of the stability of Ubuntu LTS.
https://neon.kde.org/ [kde.org]

I honestly Windows 98 looked better than all these new desktops. Flat icons are simply ugly. maybe ok on a small phone screen but they have no place on the desktop, As for the colour schemes they all look like washed out uninspring crap.

Really desktops were pretty much usable and done decades ago. Now all we get is continual reinvention of the wheel with new hipster crap and the removal of anything resembling a useful feature because 2% of the morons who use computers can't cope with any sort of configuration.

The only slightly sane window manager left is XFCE. God forbid the go down the flat icon, crap colour scheme, hipster crap route. If they do I'll be back to using the command line exclusively.

Totally agree with you. UIs have gone worse terribly in the last few years all in the name of stupid trends designers copy from each other and of consistency. i.e.: Forcing a mobile UI in a desktop where it totally doesn't make sense.
You'd think the open source people would have more sense but they always end up copying whatever Google/Apple/Ms are doing.
At least in Linux we can choose our DE. In Windows and Mac you're stuck with whatever the UI gods have thought of

The one KDE desktop I did like was that of Fedora Core 2 and 3, it had an old-style start menu that shows everything and it looked neat/sharp enough. Konsole and Kate were the same way and it was mostly useful (e.g. Konsole's GUI helps you with copy/pasting stuff or tabs), these were the two main ones we had to use.Back then everyone only used 98se, 2000 or XP 32bit.Funnily a few years later I saw some vanilla KDE 3.5 elsewhere and it kind of sucked, with the ugly clock style and lack of hat icons. Ubuntu w

I just downloaded Neon yesterday on the recommendation of someone here. I wanted to try it on my laptop, to see whether or not the latest version of Plasma 5 has fixed the annoyances that are keeping me away. But Neon appears to be lacking the "Driver Manager" I'm used to from Kubuntu and Mint, so I can't even enable wifi. Any ideas?

Use Manjaro: http://www.manjaro.org./ [www.manjaro.org] It's based on Arch, so Manjaro is to Arch as Ubuntu/Neon is to Debian. They have a great KDE version of the distro, and they've integrated their hardware driver manager into the Plasma 5 System Settings.

Well, originally KDE was intended as an open source CDE clone so that's not too surprising.

These days I actually rather like KDE, for all the hate the latest versions get I find that it has a nice balance of working out of the box and being configurable. It's not quite on par with the closed-source desktop environments (i.e. Windows and MacOS) when it comes to being pre-configured with sane defaults but it's good enough, especially compared to GNOME, Xfce and the various standalone window managers (I mean,

KDE has had a basically-Windows-plus-the-kitchen-sink-look-and-feel almost from the beginning. While Microsoft had the money to employ usability testers and developers to rein-in the UI and make it mostly usable, KDE just threw everything in there. The UI was so cluttered with menus, dialogs and every damned setting under the sun it was a usability nightmare. It's not surprising that GNOME stole a lead and hasn't really relinquished it even with GNOME 3.

These days I think Microsoft is using the same usability testers as KDE, the users themselves! You're right though, it's amazing on my Slackware install that even with all the fancy KDE gadgets it's usually simpler to user one of Slackware's CLI configuration tools. I've tried KDE 5 in an OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 virtual machine and it seemed like they took away the few features that I actually did used and added a whole lot more of the stuff I don't. I guess maybe I should look in to getting set up with one o

I remember compiling KDE 2.0 on a Sparcstation 5 when I was an intern. Solaris came with CDE, which is a POS. Took several days to compile and resulted in a poorly performing DE, but no longer suffering from the ugly unfriendly CDE:)

Been using KDE since before 1.0 came out on x86 though. Man, what an upgrade over things like fvwm it was.

Now the developers seem to have lost their way a bit. Currently I'm on some frankenstein mixup of kde4 and kde5 with bits and pieces missing or inaccessible. And still barely different from KDE3.x. Sure, they created a lot of stuff like "activities". Still don't know what those are though...

In case you were serious, an activity is basically a virtual workspace with preset layout and applications on it. It's like the next evolutionary step forward for virtual desktop spaces. It's also a convenient way to switch between layouts. For example, you can have one activity for desktop work, another for mobile-style app launching, maybe a third that is set up to act like a DVR when your laptop is plugged into a TV.

I think KDE was a bit ahead of the times when they launched activities. Apart from the vi

In which ways, exactly, was CDE a "piece of shit"? I'm curious to know the reasons. Can you give some?

I used CDE and it worked fine. You had a common desktop environment you could use on any workstation that Sun made, from the biggest to the smallest. You could go from vendor to vendor and still have a familiar environment that wouldn't get in your way, you could be productive immediately. AIX, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Solaris, even UnixWare. CDE was for work and it did that job well.

I did the same thing at Uni. The problem with CDE was that by the timeframe we are talking about here, CDE was showing its age. Incoming students all came from Windows 9x, which when compared to CDE was positively advanced (in their minds anyway). KDE 2.0 provided a much more familiar environment to work in, plus it offered an integrated way to deal with removable media, which CDE simply knew nothing about. Long-time users of course would use the mtools on the command-line.

And if it is still around for another 20 years, I will ignore it for those too. It has nothing to recommend it, and it is frankly not necessary or beneficial for anything. My fwvm configuration from 25 years back (initially on SunOS) works just fine, with half a day spend porting it to fvwm2 during the whole time.

Happy birthday KDE. I know we haven't seen each other much the last few years, sorry about that, but when you went all "pretty" with KDE4 it was like you were snubbing people like me who just wanted a functional desktop and had found that in you. I am mostly with OS X these days, I know she is a primadona and we don't have what I had with you back in the KDE 3 days, so I'll always reminisce those times...Best wishes.

I agree. Although for me the downfall wasn't going 'pretty', it was in instability. For almost a year I struggled with a bug where something would cause dbus to inexplicably eat 100% of the CPU and the only way to get out of it was to reboot. I could just restart KDE, but then it would come back. I had my machine on 24/7, and about once a week I would wake up to the cpu having been pegged all night. Sometimes it would happen while I was using it. It was maddening. I posted and searched, and nobody had

I've never heard anyone else say that the "K" in KDE was for "Kool". In fact in a previous install I had of KDE there was a splash screen that rotated through that claimed the K did not stand for anything.

But now kde5 has taken away the different backgrounds on each virtual desktop feature (it's kind of supported through some other feature, but the new way is confusing and way overkill), and more importantly they took away session restore! So if you shutdown/reboot/crash, none of your existing items will come back. So my multiple gvim windows, my sometimes dozens of shell windows, all gone. And they don't plan to fix that, because they say noone wants it. Well I do.

I'll give you different backgrounds on virtual desktops (although you can emulate this with "activities" - but they're personally a feature I never use), but what on earth are you on about WRT session restore? Running KDE on Arch, so pretty much the latest version; System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session, there's the "On Login" part that offers "Restore previous session", "Restore manually saved session" or "Start with an empty session", and also a selection for "Applications to be excluded from sessions". What more do you want?

I can't speak for *buntu, but I just tried enabling session restore (I dislike it myself so I have it disabled), opened a few tabs in Konsole in different directories, logged out and back in. The Konsole tabs were opened just fine to where they were, with their command history intact. As were the rest of my programs. Not going to install gvim just to try it out, and it very well may be that it would not work; but judging by that kde.org thread (or rather, the one it has been marked a duplicate issue of), it

Session restore is definitely still there - at least with Arch on my laptop, and I don't know why it wouldn't be there with other distros (though I suppose that it could have been missing with an earlier version of KDE 5). That being said, it seems far buggier than session restore was with KDE 4. Too often, apps don't come back, or they come back on the wrong desktop. In general, I've found KDE 5 to be far buggier than KDE 4 at this stage, and I'm quite glad that my desktop is still running KDE 4. But I ass

Hmm, my experience has been quite the opposite. I migrated from 3.x to 4 around... 4.2 or 4.3. It was way too early still. It took long for the desktop to get usable in even a very general sense. 5 though has been quite smooth. Some teething issues initially, for sure, but nowadays it's great*). Really the only two things I'm missing from 3.x anymore is the ability to configure the auto-hide delay for panels (I'd settle even for just a text file if it could be configured) and the ability to drag-and-drop a

Session restore is still there. Go to System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session. Under "On Login," make sure either "Restore Previous Session" (which is the default setting) or "Restore manually saved session" options are selected.

You can easily get different backgrounds if you use activities instead of virtual desktops. Activities are pretty much the same except they're more powerful: you can have different widgets in different activities, and you can set various applications to auto

KDE is still my DE of choice for Linux machines. They lost their way around the 4.0-4.6 release, but KDE 5 has been quite good for me.

Dolphin is much better than it used to be as well. When that came out I was in the Konqueror4Life group, but honestly, they've done a very good job with it. For instance, in Konq I would have to head up to the menus to load a profile to emulate midnight commander, but in Dolphin they've conveniently put a split button right on top. And you can still add extensions easily with

As a Qt developer, I've used(and developed for) KDE extensively. Although my primary DE is fluxbox, I always recommend KDE for a beginner and IMO it is the best Linux DE. Sucks that it too is following Gnome wrt eye-candy something fluxbox can't and won't do.

KDE created KHTML.Webkit was forked from KHTML.Blink was forked from Webkit.

Therefore everyone reading this on a browser other than Firefox or IE/Edge owes their browsing experience to KDE.

KDE didn't get paid a thing for helping Apple and then Google dominate web browsing. Imagine what they could have achieved if they had been paid even a tiny fraction of the wealth that their code has generated.

Through the teenage years and on to having improper relationships with other desktops and O/Ss. It's already having kids. Maybe in a few more years it'll settle down and be reasonable to be around again.

Until the KDE developers decided to reinvent the wheel, and make KDE the star of the show, determining what is best for you, what it is that you can and can't do, while consuming preposterous amounts of memory in the process. Happy birthday indeed.

I was a KDE 2 and 3 user. Then, when the 4 craziness started, I waited until 4.5, something like that. But the "everything is a widget" idea is really weird. With the plus of several bugs, kdm bugs, app launcher bugs, systray bugs, sound mixer eating memory, and, at every minor upgrade, I had to clean up my configurations to get the new version working. If not enough, they announced KDE 5, and all started again.

I never liked Gnome shell. Not to mention all the removing-features-coolaid since 3.

I remember dabbling in Linux about RedHat 5 times. I think my first home install was 5.1. Back then the default desktop for RH was FVWM, which in hindsight was pretty good. But coming from Windows 95, it was pretty bewildering and somewhat disjointed and not well integrated. I think it was about this time I started reading slashdot and heard about this new KDE desktop. KDE 1.0. Somehow there were packages for RH 5.1 or 5.2, so I downloaded them and installed. I was stunned. Except for the one-click nonsense I finally had a workable desktop with an integrated file manager, start menu, removable disk management and it looked kind of like Windows 95. Combine that with the release of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and suddenly I had everything I needed to stay in Linux for my everyday work as a student. I quickly moved on to Gnome 1.x, although I can't for the life of me remember why as the first Gnome releases were horrible--maybe it was because gnome used proper double clicks. But I remember KDE 1.0 with fondness.

A few years later another couple of landmark applications (at the time anyway) to come out of the KDE world that changed my life as a neophyte Linux programmer were the releases in the 2.0 days of kdevelop and kdbg. Especially the latter, as I found command-line debugging difficult, and I found ddd to be too complicated at the time. kdbg did the job and was easy to use. And Kdevelop helped introduce me to the world of Linux programming in C and C++. Now I just use vim and the command line, but Kdevelop, like KDE 1.0 before it, offered me a familiar environment to ease the learning curve of moving to Linux. I know it did the same for many of our students at university too after I deployed it along with the full KDE 2.0 (and also Gnome) suite in our labs.

First of all, thank you KDE Team for your great contribution to the FOSS community. However, I stopped using KDE after the version 4 fiasco. Now I bounce between XFCE/Openbox and TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment [trinitydesktop.org]). If you used to be a KDE fan, consider supporting the latter. TDE is the default desktop in Q4OS [q4os.org], another very interesting project.

Any article about KDE seems to bring out the haters, but I have used it since version 1 on Corel Linux (remeber Corel?). I've tried most other desktops over the years, and particularly tried really hard to like Enlightenment, but have always stuck with KDE. Even through the dodgy early years of KDE4. I just love how well all KDE apps integrate together, and I actually like that I can customise everything if I want.

The KDE and Gnome developers are doing what they are doing in a misguided effort to stay relevant. The truth is that the desktop environment problem with the current interfaces (screen, keyboard and mouse) was solved long ago. They just keep remodeling it, adding things, removing things, but it is pretty much more of the same - more baroque, with more bells and whistles, more resource hungry, but with the same essentials disguised in many different, more or less creative, ways. It is no wonder that, with th

A big room somewhere in Europe with lots of chrome and glass and a great big whiteboard in the front with lots of tiny, neat writing on it. There are about 50 desks, each with headphones and pristine workstations, also with a lot of chrome and glass. The faint sound of classical music permeates the room, accompanying the clicky-click of 50 programmers typing or quietly talking in one of the appropriately assig